The standard setting on setting up Xsan 3 is Extended Attributes = On. Is that OK for Non-Mac Clients running the current version of StorNext or not? Any help is appreciated, as the documentation is not very clear on that point imo.

Yes this is fine. This is my personal expericence and might help you in the future as many have not thought about doing this.

I had a customer who "lost all his data" or so he thought. As a engineer you always tell you customer things and it seems that they just don't hear what you are saying until you politely tell them "nah nah da boo boo, I told you so" I remember specifically telling him that you need to ask before you update your OS version. So he decieded not to do it anyway, but only do it on half. So he had a wonderful mix between OS X 10.6.7 and 10.6.8 which is when on the Apple wolrd extended attributes became different. Basically what happened was the MDC couldn't understand the extended attribute, thus not allowing the SAN to mount. So after fighting the entire day with this, I simply grabbed a Linux machine installed Stornext made a temp license and was able to mount the X-SAN volume via the Linux MDC. We copied all the data off and then back on again. Now he keeps to upgrading to me.

The reason for this story is to tell you that Linux doesn't care about exteded attributes.

If you connect StorNext clients to an Xsan volume, avoid enabling native extended attributes. StorNext clients may not preserve extended attributes when copying or moving files on the SAN volume.

If you ignore this, you shouldn't get data corruption, but the metadata in extended attributes (resource forks, labels/tags, Finder comments, etc) can be lost whenever a StorNext system updates or copies a file. Depending on the apps you use and your workflow, this may or may not be a big deal.

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